Seed biblioteek works on "Reconnecting seed with story, towards resilience & sovereignty. Integral to food systems, seed is our land, heritage & future." Patent laws that colonise local seed banks and seed trade to 'protect' the GMO industry endanger the livelihoods of small scale farmers. Food security is about access to food that food sovereignty provides, not excess food that industrial farming produces. Industrial farming produces excess food, but does not improve food security as it creates financial and legal barriers to food and therefore decreases food security and sovereignty.
BUT...

What is the importance of seed and seed banks for the persistance of indigenous vegetation and the ecosystems they support? Help us collect seeds and cuttings from indigenous plants in your garden by starting a home nursery or seed bank of your own.

Vandana Shiva is an inspiring environmental activist from India who talks out clearly and confidently against GMOs, nuclear energy and industrial farming.

BUT...

What kind of support can South African's provide to our environmental activists so that they can grow into the shoes of the likes of Vandana Shiva? What role will seedbanks play in the future of food security in South Africa?

Iingcungcu project has successfully developed sunbirds gardens at a number of schools in Cape Town, while integrating the ecology of the gardens into the learnings of the students at each school.

BUT...

How do we extend the success of these gardens so that we can reach out to the wider public? Communitree is trying this out in Rosebank by planting a sunbird gardens in public spaces around the suburb. Visit the Rosebank section of the website to see more.

Michael Werikhe was very successful and fund-raising and raising awareness. What can we learn from Michael Werikhe's fund-raising projects? It is important for all of us to build better relationships with our environment. Michael Werikhe is an example of an alternative to the usual pale face of conservation.

BUT...

How do people with education and resource privilidge work together with people with little privilidge without repoducing oppressive power imbalances? What does a progressive organsiation look like and how does it operate to bring environmental issues to every type of home in a relevant, meaningful and respectful way?

The PHA food and farming campaign has struggled for years and
managed to fend of development in an agriculturally and
ecologically significant place. Much campaigning work is still
needed, but at the same time emerging small scale farmers are
working on how to make their farm financially and ecologically
sustainable.

BUT...

What does it mean to have
secure land ownership if the land itself and the environmental
systems around it are being degraded by the property development
mafia of Cape Town. Is there such as thing as permanent land and
food security? What kind of law and governance would ensure
this?

Herbanisation creates medicinal indigenous gardens to serve the
local medicinal needs of residents while taking pressure of the
plant resources that are harvested from biodiversity reserves in
Cape Town. This project thinks of the needs of people at the same
time as considering the limits of our environmental systems.

BUT...

Despite winning numerous awards, this
project is currently without funding. How do we ensure that great
projects like these persist?

In this book Cormac Cullinan proposes "recognizing natural
communities and ecosystems as legal persons with legal rights. The
book explains the concept of wild law, that is, human laws that are
consistent with earth jurisprudence. Wild law is a law
made by people to regulate human behaviour that privileges maintaining
the integrity and functioning of the whole Earth community in the long
term, over the interests of any species (including humans) at a
particular time. Earth
jurisprudence is a philosophy of law and human governance that is
based on the idea that humans are only one part of a wider community of
beings and that the welfare of each member of that community is dependent
on the welfare of the Earth as a whole.

The appreciation of human dependency on nature is wonderful: Take
care of the forest or "you will throw your spear for hunting and
all you will hit is a rock". The scale of tree planting is
also inspiring, and goes to show what can be done when resources
are made available for restoration of ecology that supports our
lives.

An inspiring campaign that successfully defended Princess Vlei from another shopping mall development. A large group of people from a diverse cross-section of society banded together to defend this space that has significant cultural, spiritual and ecological value to many Capetonians.

BUT...

Protesting is exhausting. What do we do to get to a position where capitalist colonisation is on its back-foot, where the poor and the environment are strategically and politically well-placed for the long term, rather than the poor and the environment having to reactively fight to defend themselves?